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How To Track 100 Web Sites With A Click On Your Mac

We live in an era that’s increasingly complex. It’s a life of too much information. We simply cannot digest it all.

Daily news that once came from the TV or newspaper or radio now comes from thousands of sources online. Videos. Articles. Blogs. News. Information. It’s everywhere at once. What’s the best way a Mac user can make sense of it all and keep up? Efficiency.

Bring all your news and information sources to a single location.

Google’s Reader Brings You The World

We’re not big fans of Google at Mac360. However, many of their online services are free. Google’s ads help to pay the bills (hint, hint), too.

Among those highly useful services is Google Reader. It’s an online aggregator app that stores web site Atom and RSS feeds in a collection.

To make Reader really useful for Mac users you need an app like Caffeinated. It’s a Google Reader client with a few social flourishes you’ll like.

By stuffing a hundred or so web site RSS feeds into Google Reader and using Caffeinated to read them, you save a bunch of time. No more clicking from site to site. Caffeinated brings the news to you.

Click on an RSS or Atom feed subscription in the left hand corner, and Caffeinated gives you the site’s headlines. Click on a headline and get the details. It’s all in one app.

It doesn’t stop there. One thing we’ve learned to do in the social age of the internet is to share.

Caffeinated brings sharing with Facebook and Twitter.

This kind of integration becomes useful when you’re scanning dozens and dozens of headlines and you want to share with others.

Caffeinated lets you bookmark articles, and use Instapaper to save articles to be read later (on your iPhone or iPad).

All you need to get started is a free Google Reader account (priced right), Caffeinated, and web sites with Atom or RSS feeds (start with Mac360).

Soon, you’ll have a collection of web sites stuffed into Google Reader. In exchange, you can browse through dozens or hundreds of sites within minutes.

All the news and information and entertainment comes to you in the form of a site name, a headline, and the article’s contents. There’s no better way to keep informed than by taking control of the information that crosses your Mac’s screen.

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About Ron McElfresh

My first Mac was the 128k model (from 1984, so I'm old). I live and work in Honolulu, Hawaii. Read more of my articles here. Read more Mac stuff on McSolo, or a little thoughtful nonsense on McElfresh.org.